Belize Emerges as Global Leader in Anti-Money Laundering

Belize is making waves on the global stage with its efforts to combat money laundering and terrorism. On Thursday, the Caribbean Financial Action Taskforce released Belize’s fourth Round Mutual Evaluation Report, highlighting the country’s impressive strides in fighting money laundering, terrorism financing, and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. The report assessed Belize in two key areas: technical compliance and effectiveness. Out of the forty CFATF recommendations for technical compliance, Belize was fully compliant in thirty-eight. The country also achieved substantial effectiveness in five of the eleven immediate outcomes, moderate in five, and low in just one. We caught up with Leni Ysaguirre-McGann, the Director of the Financial Intelligence Unit, to discuss this remarkable achievement and what it means for Belize’s future.

 

Leni Ysaguirre-McGann, Director, F.I.U Belize

“Belize is a part of the international financial system. We want to operate in this financial system. It is important for our economic viability and our business viability that we are able to transact. And the reason why the FATF and these organizations are so effective at essentially pressuring countries, because it is a system of peer pressure, and they are quite effective in having countries abide and comply with these standards because failure to comply means you end up in some sort of review process or follow up process, grey listing or blacklisting. The intention is to put pressure on you to address any shortcomings. So, for us the goal was to avoid the blacklist and grey list and by avoiding it, means we don’t end up in an enhanced review process following our assessments. What would have happened had we not avoided those listings is that we would have ended up in a review process following our evaluation where they would then zone into the areas of deficiencies and put us on an action plan with specific timeline that we would have had to abide by. Now Belize has entered into what is called regular follow up process. This is essentially the gold standard. This is there we want to be. Our reporting periods are longer. We have two and a half years. In those two and a half years we provide updates on how we have been keeping our regime and how we have addressed deficiencies in our report.”